MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Saturday, 26 November 2011

Guest Review: Loveday On Gaffield

Mike Loveday reviews

Tokaido
Road

by
Nancy Gaffield

The latest Murakami novel hits
the bookstores, the marketing machine starts a-whirring, and Japanese culture
is once again making literary headlines. Nancy Gaffield’s book, inspired by
Japanese art, and published by the marvellous CB editions earlier in the
summer, has just won the Aldeburgh first collection prize. Hopefully this award
will provide additional marketing of sorts to bring yet more readers to what is
an excellent book of poetry. It is a fascinating themed sequence, responding to
Hiroshige’s woodcut prints (made in 1833-4) which charted the route of Tokaido
road, linking Japan’s East and West.

It has been said that there is
something in Japanese culture which appeals to a British reader – perhaps a
shared valorization of reserve and an emphasis on social hierarchy. And one of
the great joys of this collection is that its descriptions immerse us in an
ancient foreign culture and geography. This is often helped by evocative Japanese
words judiciously placed within the poems. There is a long glossary at the back
of the book which always helps satisfy the occasional urge to pick beyond the musical
and beautiful foreignness of these terms. “The camellia he gave her | rises up
like onryō” (Kusatsu, p.60), “Here the sake tastes of flowers| over the ayu |
we put our differences aside.” (Kuwana, p.48), “the edo-jin stir ashes to a
dogged glow.” (Nihonbashi, p.1).

There are 55 poems here, each responding
to a woodcut about a single staging point or “station” upon the Tokaido Road between
the terminal points of Nihonbashi and Kyoto. Sometimes the poems describe the
locations with verisimilitude; at other times they are more complicated,
describing a journey into the woodcut print itself and / or making the print sing
with invented narrative. The poems are remarkably vivid, and I found my mind
being drawn as much to the ideas of journey and place as to ideas of art and
its relationship to poetry.

The nature of the journey
undertaken in the poems remains ambiguous – sometimes we’re given an omniscient
view of anonymous individuals set in landscapes and towns; occasionally third-person
narrative focusing on one of three characters – Hiro, Mariko, Kikuyo. These
three remain mysterious, ghostly figures - their narratives hinted at rather than
spelled out. The nature of any link between Hiro and the artist Hiroshige
remains unclear, however it is impossible not to draw parallels because of the connected
names. There is in addition a beautiful and haunting river voice appearing in
some poems “I am patient, | my fingers spread | across the plain | reading you.”
(Fujeida, p.25), “Lose your footing now | and you are mine, I | will take you away to Suruga Bay.” (Shimada
p.26).

There is also an “I” persona,
undertaking some kind of personal quest - perhaps for Hiro, perhaps for a
stronger sense of herself: “I am almost never here | in these old prints, but
look harder, | closer, and I’m everywhere.” (Ōtsu, p.61). We don’t know if
Gaffield herself made the Tokaido Road journey, and we are left uncertain
whether the “I” voice is making a physical journey along Tokaido as well as an
imaginative journey responding to the woodcuts. Perhaps because of this, some
of the poems feel like they are set in Hiroshige’s era, some in the present –
this boundary of time is blurred. It is difficult to assess, without the prints
alongside the poems, how accurate these re-imaginings and descriptive responses
are – are they free associations drawing upon the poet’s personal experience? Or
are they visually faithful? Looking at the original prints, the poems seem to
play with both approaches, which is surely the more interesting technique. Ekphrastic
poems, or poems responding to artwork, raise difficult questions for both poet
and reader. Does it matter if a poem omits a seemingly significant visual
detail? Is it somehow inauthentic if a poem adds a detail not in the original
artwork – an object outside its frame say? Or a social context that’s not
visible? What about an interpretative verbal brushstroke, or a narrative coming-to-life
imagined by the poet? Or are these aspects instead necessary for a good poem to
stand in its own right as a work of art? These questions are fundamental to
Gaffield’s project.

As Japanese nature poems, the
sketching of landscape is gentle, in the wise, conscientious spirit of haiku.
They share also perhaps a kindred spirit with the short nature lyrics which
have appeared in the second half of Michael Longley’s career. Moments focusing
on limpid details can sometimes seem like a haiku embedded within another poem.
Here are three lines taken from a twenty-one line poem:

“Wayside shelter, June afternoon

tea kettle hangs from tree branch,

water begins to boil.”

(Fukuroi, p.31)

The poems, painter and narrator
are caught in a tug of war over their allegiances between the natural and the
human worlds:

“Those men colluding under the
tree

mean nothing, I yearn for the sea

today coated in quicksilver.”

(Chiryū, p.44)

When wit and tension arrive to
supplement the beautiful descriptions, it is a neat shift from the delicate,
warm sincerity which is the dominant mode:

“Women sit in the sun peeling
gourds

and hanging the ochreous flesh

from scaffolds.”

(Minakuchi, p.58)

“The stone ahead

becomes the headstone.”

(Shōno, p.52)

Fleeting statements of wisdom are
threaded into the poems, ranging between the philosophical, mystical, gnomic
and more telling: “Here is the dewy path
| to leave our cares behind | Hiro
says as he hands her a single | camellia”. (Mariko, p.22); “Remove your sentiments | and leave them
outside the door.” (Goyu, p. 40); “Remember
– all existence is cyclical.” (Totsuka, p.6); “a sign pointing to Kamakura reads | Cultivate the joy of being rather than
having.” (Hodogaya, p. 5). There is an appealing balance between these
moments of wisdom and immersion in the poetry of sensory witnessing.

Generally we are in a world of
gesture and suggestion, moments which raise more questions than answers. In
only a couple of places are we struck by words explaining the nature of Gaffield’s
objective:

“I want you to connect the image

with the human story”

(Shimada, p. 26).

“There is no clear boundary

between memory and imagination,

memory carries a trace

of place, gives us presence

in absence.”

(Kyoto, p.62)

However Gaffield’s method is usually
subtle, building up a picture gradually across the sustained sequence without
insisting upon intention, purpose or significance. Compare, for example, the evocative,
delicate and resonant style here:

“I look for you in a poem

but find only unendingness,

imagine a day so light

even memories float away.”

(Kuwana, p.48)

Sometimes the reader longs to be
given a stronger grip on the lives of the four characters (the “I” voice and the
three figures Hiro, Mitsuko, Kikoyu) who appear in fleeting sightings. Perhaps the
enigmatic nature of these figures is entirely the point, yet it is still
frustrating not to be able to glean more. In what way are these characters
found within the woodcuts, or were they drawn from elsewhere? What are their
stories and why do they matter? Even the
poet herself teases us “Who is making? Who is speaking?... Who is Hiro? A
painter? A lover? Whose time does he inhabit? And the women who love him?
(Shirasuka, p.37).

With the exception of some prose
poems or haibun (prose poem combined with haiku), and suggestions of sonnets, almost
all of these poems are free verse, sometimes flowingly shaped, sometimes more
tensely scattered on the page. The supreme moments in these poems are places
where the simple, lucid language is compounded by a quietly breathtaking use of
line break or syntax. Gaffield can be particularly skilled at opening windows
of additional meaning with simple gestures:

“Mariko’s reach always exceeded her grasp,

she couldn’t get him

out of her mind.”

(Mitsuke, p.32)

There is a discrete emphasis here
upon Mariko’s failure and possible obsession, just created by Gaffield’s line
break between second and third lines.

Or, less obvious examples: in the
following pair of lines, the word “by” has two meanings – has the old woman
been discovered beside a memory or discovered through it?

“Too late. I am an old woman

found by a memory” (Hiratsuka,
p.8)

And in the pair of lines below, “river”
can be re-read almost as a direct address to the river, an affirmation and
emphatic assertion that the “I” remembers:

“I am a remnant

river, I remember.”

(Kanaya, p.27)

“Ut pictura poesis” (“like a
picture, poetry”) Horace wrote in Epistles, II, 3 (often called the first text
connecting the visual and verbal arts). As a poetic response to artwork, this
is a compellingly cinematic collection. These poems are in a complex correspondence
with the Tokaido Road prints, but also succeed as poems in their own right,
conjuring atmospheres and stories without the woodcuts being there.

Yet the book is also about Japan,
travel, and the relationship between society and Nature. The collection left me
wanting to make the same physical journey along Tokaido Road one day, with both
Hiroshige’s prints and Gaffield’s book as welcome creative company, deepening
the travelling experience. And by reading this sequence of poems, I also felt
that I had made part of that journey already, in imaginative terms.

If you’re a prose reader tempted to
travel into Japan via Murakami, but reluctant to be enslaved by the marketing
machine which surrounds his new book, why not try a different way in. If you read poetry, this
is one of the most unusual and thought-provoking collections of 2011.

Mike Loveday is a British poet, currently taking his MFA at Kingston University. He recently launched his debut collection at the London Oxfam Poetry Series. He is editor of Fourteen magazine.